


The Fall's Gonna Kill You

by victoria_p (musesfool)



Category: Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: F/M, West Wing Title Project, plotless character ramble
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-03
Updated: 2019-10-03
Packaged: 2020-11-23 01:56:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20884259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/musesfool/pseuds/victoria_p
Summary: Inej relearns her body as she learns the city.





	The Fall's Gonna Kill You

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the [**West Wing title project**](https://musesfool.dreamwidth.org/386778.html). This is mostly me trying to write my way into Inej's head.

As much as she'd like to stay in her tiny room, Inej is not going to pay off her contract hiding in it with the door barred and her back to the wall. She is small and silent and at home in the shadows, and that's where she first makes a place for herself in the Slat. She's the pause in the raucous laughter, a shadow in the flickering lamplight, a salty breeze through a window that nobody noticed was open before.

She'd taught herself, in the silk prison of the Menagerie, to hold everything inside in a little locked box behind her ribs, to make a mirror of her blankness and a virtue of her passivity, and to remove herself completely from her body when it all became overwhelming.

She isn't passive anymore. She can't be and survive.

She relearns her body as she learns the city. She scampers up buildings and leaps across alleys and feels more herself than she has since she was kidnapped. The fierce burn in well-used muscles is a physical pleasure she'd almost forgotten and welcomes anew. She eats waffles dusted with powdered sugar and drinks coffee tinged with cinnamon and remembers the joy of friendship and the satisfaction of a full belly, and a few hours' sleep after a hard day's work. She doesn't flinch anymore when Jesper slings a friendly arm across her shoulders, doesn't freeze when Nina grabs her hand to drag her to a table at the best coffee house in Ketterdam. And she doesn't fall, even when the climb seems impossible.

She maps the rain-slicked rooftops and the cobblestone streets the same way she catalogues Kaz's moods, interprets his sharp words and even sharper silences, and the quicksilver flashes of emotion on his face when he thinks she isn't looking.

He's not kind, but the lying, thieving bastard of the Barrel is truthful with her and there's a kindness in that, even if he would scoff and tell her to stop being naive. But while he bought her contract, and it cost him dear, he never beats her when he's angry and he never barges into her little room to yell at her when she makes a mistake. Her space is her space and her body is her body; on the rare occasions he touches her—to guide her fingers the first time he shows her how to pick a lock, to nudge her feet a little further apart the first time he shows her how to throw a punch—it is quick, businesslike, the cool smoothness of his gloves nothing like the sweaty grasping fingers of the Menagerie's clientele. (It is only through close observation that she learns just how rare those touches are, and how many of them are hers and no one else's.)

They are friends, to that extent that Kaz Brekker _has_ friends, and while Inej can see how that happened, over long hours in his office and longer nights on damp rooftops, she still can't say when that friendship, on her part at least, tipped over into something more. She holds so many secrets, knows all the things that go on in the darkest corners of the city, and yet his secrets are the ones she keeps like oaths—the pale slim strength of his gloveless hands, smooth as any rich mercher's wife's, the bare bones of the true story of his rebirth, from whip-smart boy fascinated by stage magic to the monster known as Dirtyhands. He wears his brokenness with pride, but she's one of the few who's seen just how broken he is, and how the healing warped him even as it made him stronger. 

She's used to the sudden shortness of breath, the tightness in her chest and the prickling awareness on her skin whenever anyone gets too close, so it takes a long time to isolate the difference when it's Kaz—his nearness like a jolt of strong coffee, setting all her senses on alert, but in a way that makes her want to stand and fight instead of freeze or flee.

It takes her even longer to realize there's another choice, and in that sense, she truly has been willfully naive.

There had been boys in the caravan, but she'd grown up with all of them and was related to most of them, so they held no inherent fascination for her as a girl. She'd been a young fourteen, and before she was taken, she thought she'd have all the time in the world to grow into womanhood, to have her first crush and her first kiss. So many firsts were brutally stolen from her, and it doesn't occur her to her until they're in the thick of it in Fjerda and they could all die (as opposed, she thinks later in wry amusement, to all the other times they could have died), that maybe she could make the second first times count just as much or more, with someone she truly cared about, or even loved.

Of course, loving Kaz is asking for heartbreak. For a time, she thinks he _can't_ love her back, and then that he just doesn't. But Inej knows how to read people, and she knows how to read _him_, so she knows he does. She's just not sure it matters. It's a weakness, and he's already killed off so many other parts of himself to avoid ever being weak again.

Her doubts when Van Eck threatens to shatter her legs are not unfounded. That doesn't make them hurt any less.

But afterwards, Kaz's words, fierce and fervent as a vow, set heat alight throughout her body, make her belly flip like a dive from the tallest spire in Ketterdam. The brief brush of his hand, the whisper-light touch of his lips on her skin in that hotel bathroom, and she is on fire with something she thought she'd never feel, something she'd thought lost in the smothering silks and sheer terror of the Menagerie. Yet one more thing he's given back to her.

Inej leaves, because right now, her heart leads her away from Ketterdam—from Kaz—but she knows one day it will lead her back. She still has territory to map with hands and lips, new terrain to uncover, and new secrets to learn, when Kaz finally removes the severe black suit he wears like armor.


End file.
